You know? Honestly, genocide doesn't actually exactly fit with what Israel is doing. Mass murder of civilians, starvation, attacks on journalists and aid workers, denial of medical care, theft of people's homes and theft of their property... they're doing virtually every type of war crime, now including the use of chemical weapons apparently, but (edit: ~~they're not literally trying to exterminate the Palestinians as a genotype~~ I misunderstood genocide) they could claim without obviously being full of shit that they're not trying to destroy the nation of Palestine completely. I think they are trying to, but it's not as clear-as-day as lot of their crimes which are on video and in the present/past, instead of the future.

Almost any type of war crime case could have been mounted against them, and it would have been a more solid case at the ICJ. There wouldn't have been room for all this semantic wiggling in the press over whether it's actually genocide, or merely mass murder and war criminality.

It almost makes me think that there was some sort of deliberate effort to bring over-the-top charges that would leave that wiggle room, instead of more conservative charges. Prosecutors will sometimes do this when they want to kill a case without showing any appearance of other than a vigorous prosecution. You bring murder 1 when you can't prove it, and give the defense something to work with, instead of charging second-degree murder and having a slam dunk.

I have no reason to think they might have done that, but I do wonder about it.